Plate depicting Domenico de Massimo, from a series of twelve showing knights and their attendants dressed for a tournament (plate 4) 1565

Curator: Look at this—an anonymous engraving from 1565, now held at the Metropolitan Museum. It's a plate from a series depicting knights dressed for a tournament. Specifically, this one is "Plate depicting Domenico de Massimo, from a series of twelve showing knights and their attendants dressed for a tournament (plate 4)." Editor: Intricate, certainly! And it feels… dense. A real panorama of Renaissance power, frozen in print. The sheer repetition of horses and figures is quite something. Makes you wonder about the artist's hand—so many identical forms meticulously rendered. Curator: Identical, perhaps, but look closer! There's a vibrancy in the detail—the way the light catches the armor, the expressions, even the musculature of the horses. I imagine the artist was really trying to capture the energy of such events, and convey their feeling in all its complexity. Editor: Definitely, the "feel" comes across but I’m also curious about the function of the print. Was this primarily decorative, or was it also circulated as a record of the tournament for later consultation? Perhaps for future armorer and garment-makers? After all, these tournaments involved so much labor in their material creation. Curator: Possibly both! But to imagine these horses, trained to be responsive even burdened with ornamented coverings and riders in metal suits, conveys to me this mastery of both nature and man. It's a snapshot into an elite’s culture. A carefully managed display of prestige and control. It does make you think what resources they had. Editor: Absolutely. You feel the labor, the costuming, the metalwork, everything adds up—not only artistic, but as the economy of Renaissance society and it also speaks of what resources that artist would need to make these reproductions, and of the skill in managing an intricate and expensive process, so well captured for display by way of reproductive printmaking, and accessible for distribution. Curator: I'd agree with this assessment wholeheartedly. It is really all that materiality, isn't it? Perhaps what endures the test of time—what allows us still today to marvel at how elaborate a simple material form can become to encapsulate history. Editor: Agreed, a real testament to craft, production, society and memory—a confluence of forces, really, elegantly distilled onto this plate.